I just saw this post and it reminded me of a time when we had a similar situation, but with string operations in our VM. The project is now defunct but the code is open. Let’s go back in time. It was 2018 and I had just joined a team that was bringing up a new Python runtime (then nicknamed Pyro , now called Skybison ). The goal was to use the last 30 years of VM engineering research and folk knowledge to re-design everything from scratch for performance. Also, importantly, we were goin...

There are primarily three ways of sorting slices in Go. Early on, we had the verbose but flexible method of implementing sort.Interface to sort the elements in a slice. Later, Go 1.8 introduced sort.Slice to reduce boilerplate with inline comparison functions. Most recently, Go 1.21 brought generic sorting via the slices package, which offers a concise syntax and compile-time type safety. These days, I mostly use the generic sorting syntax, but I wanted to document all three approaches f...

This is a brief explanation and a cookbook for using numpy.einsum , which lets us use Einstein notation to evaluate operations on multi-dimensional arrays. The focus here is mostly on einsum's explicit mode (with -> and output dimensions explicitly specified in the subscript string) and use cases common in ML papers, though I'll also briefly touch upon other patterns. Basic use case - matrix multiplication Let's start with a basic demonstration: matrix multiplication using einsum. T...

tl;dr: Upload a PDF document in which each slide of the carousel is one page. I wanted to post a Carousel post in LinkedIn, but had to wade through a million pages of crap in Google from companies trying to sell shit. Here’s how to do it simply. Create your carousel slides. I like using Excalidraw. Here’s an example of two simple slides (that I’ll use for posting this article on LinkedIn ∞) Export each slide as its own image file. In Excalidraw select t...

This post has two interesting aspects: It will disappear when it’s finished what it set out to do, and it’s also a fundraising for another fundraiser. This is the 20th anniversary of the BBS Documentary , my 2005 released DVD box set. The work was always open licensed and it can be downloaded very easily from a variety of places. So, let’s be very clear – this isn’t some gatekept situation where the movie has been “gone” before now. The physical boxes I sold from 2005 to...

Watch on YouTube: 11ty Meetup: Blog Awesome from WordPress to Eleventy Event page on 11tymeetup.dev Watch on YouTube: 11ty Meetup: Blog Awesome from WordPress to Eleventy Event page on 11tymeetup.dev Watch on YouTube: 11ty Meetup: Blog Awesome from WordPress to Eleventy Watch on YouTube: 11ty Meetup: Blog Awesome from WordPress to Eleventy ...

Using local language models to populate multilingual document metadata Using local language models to populate multilingual document metadata

The Orbital Index Issue No. 310  | Mar 19, 2025 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

Mentour Pilot’s latest episode about Jet2 Flight 2152 was thankfully an example of a near miss, not an incident. His team also keep doing a stellar job; the production values of his channel, and his clear explanations, have long surpassed all those Air Crash Investigation-style shows. Flown over, you could say. But I digress. This episode included this nugget: Sometimes you need to go slowly, to speed up. I cannot tell you just how true that is . Well, evidently I can, because I jus...

I saw this post on station over on the gemini protocol today: Every now and then online, I see the following statement: “The internet is both a blessing and a curse”. I agree with this statement, what is Station’s thoughts on this statement? Read more on the site… I saw this post on station over on the gemini protocol today: Every now and then online, I see the following statement: “The internet is both a blessing and a curse”. I agree with thi...

As a software engineer experimenting with AI for the past 2 years, I’ve tested nearly every AI coding assistant on the market and developed a workflow that consistently delivers results. Here’s my tried-and-tested method for solo developers looking to leverage AI to make SaaS products. Disclaimer: While my approach requires minimal manual coding, you’ll still need a basic understanding of concepts to be able to deliver quality results. Always work with a learning mindset, and don...

The following is drawn from a speech I delivered today at Cooper Union's Great Hall in New York City, where I joined Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman to discuss the future of the American Dream: What is the American Dream? In 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, James Truslow Adams first defined the American Dream as “[...] a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. [...] not a dream...

This is the 82nd edition of People and Blogs , the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Ben Borgers and his blog, benborgers.com To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter . A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're enjoying the People and Blogs series and you want to see it grow, co...

Use Long Options in Scripts Mar 21, 2025 Many command line utilities support short form options ( -f ) and long form options ( --force ). Short form is for interactive usage. In scripts, use the long form. That is, in your terminal, type $ git switch -c my-new-branch In your release infrastructure script, write try shell.exec( "git fetch origin --quiet" , .{}); try shell.exec( "git switch --create release-{today} origin/main" , .{ .today = stdx.DateUTC.now() },...

Hey all! Anubis has really been taking off to the point that it has its own repo now . I'm going to be doing more work on it, but for right now what I really need is data. In order to get this data, I need you to let me know what I just broke by turning on Anubis in prod. What I know broke: Discord link resolving (still working on fixing this, but I wanted to get this post out first) Twitter link resolving If I missed somethi...

With care you can explain major ideas and results in computational complexity to the general public, like the P v NP problem, zero-knowledge proofs, the PCP theorem and Shor's factoring algorithms in a way that a curious non-scientist can find interesting. Quanta magazine keeps coming back to complexity . because we have a inherently interesting field. So why am I having such a difficult time with the new Ryan Williams result , that time can be simulated in nearly quadratically less memory, or...

I used AI with success 5 minutes ago. Just five minutes ago, I was writing a piece of software and relied on AI for assistance. Yet, here I am, starting this blog post by telling you that artificial intelligence, so far, has proven somewhat useless. How can I make such a statement if AI was just so helpful a moment ago? Actually, there's no contradiction here if we clarify exactly what we mean. Here’s the thing: at this very moment, artificial intelligence can support me significantly. I...

Each of us starts life as a single cell. To develop into a complex, multicellular being, that cell must divide, and then those cells must divide again, and again — and then these stem cells start to specialize into different types, with different destinies in our bodies. In the first week, our cells reach their first turning point: They must become either placenta or embryo. Then… Source Each of us starts life as a single cell. To develop into a complex, multicellular being, that cell mus...

I think the term “RSS reader” needs revisiting. I much prefer “web reader.” The term “RSS reader” is protocol-first — RSS — rather than use case first. To understand what “RSS reader” means, you need to know what RSS is and why it matters. Designing tools for everyone, not just technical audiences, necessitates careful care as to what terms we use; RSS reader, off-the-bat, adds a technical detail where none is needed. In contrast, “web reader” describes what the tool ...

OpenAI announced several new audio-related API features today, for both text-to-speech and speech-to-text. They're very promising new models, but they appear to suffer from the ever-present risk of accidental (or malicious) instruction following. gpt-4o-mini-tts gpt-4o-mini-tts is a brand new text-to-speech model with "better steerability". OpenAI released a delightful new playground interface for this at OpenAI.fm - you can pick from 11 base voices, apply instructions like "High-ener...

There are no shortcuts. You cannot build a successful company in five weeks. But for optimists (and lunatics), five weeks is plenty to start a company. You probably have a dayjob. Exceed your employer's expectations. Don't accept paychecks you don't deserve. Work on your startup mornings (not evenings) and weekends. Save your PTO until the third week, and then start taking off Mondays/Tuesdays (not Thursdays/Fridays) if needed. If you can no longer maintain stellar qua...

I often get asked what pearls are and why bivalves make them. Pearls are biogenic gemstones. This means they are valuable rocks made not by inorganic crystallization within the earth, like most gemstones, but instead are produced by life! Interestingly, they are living rocks, composed of true minerals. When I talk about minerals, I mean a solid substance with a known chemical composition and crystal structure. Pearls are specifically made mostly of a mineral called aragonite. Aragonite is ...

Six years ago, David Thompson wrote a popular blog post called “My favourite Git commit” celebrating a whimsically detailed commit message his co-worker wrote. I enjoyed the post at the time and have sent it to several teammates as a model for good commit messages. I recently revisited Thompson’s article as I was creating my own guide to writing useful commit messages . When pressed to explain what made Thompson’s post such an effective example, I was surprised to find that I couldn...